Overview for PuyaSharif - Less Wrong

Ethics of piracy

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:55:43 +1100

Submitted by PuyaSharif • -10 votes • 43 comments

I could discuss the large scale effects of piracy (copyright infringement) for days! From a game-theoretical/utilitarian -, ethical - or any other perspective. I have a set of views and suggestions for topics that could be interesting to break down and address, but instead of writing a long post addressing many different topics, Ill start with the first one in my mind.

Just a thought:

For a subset of activities you could map the question of the ethical status of illegal downloading of a software p (preferred choice) to the existence of a certain kind of element a in a set S, which I'll call the set of alternatives (assuming the risk of getting caught is very small).

Lets say that you for some reason need a graphics editor and your preferred choice is Photoshop CS5. You could either:

Buy it (650$ on Amazon).
Download it (free)

In the case you have chosen to illegally download a copy of the software, some people would compare that to stealing (certainly the folks at Adobe). Would that really be fair to say? At least in my opinion that depends on whether or not you would have bought a copy in the absence of the 'download' alternative. Your preferred choice is indeed Photoshop CS5, but that is one among many choices, the rest being in the set of alternatives S. Most users with illegal copies wouldn't pay the 650$ when there are free alternatives. Those alternatives may be much less attractive with less features but many of them would still do the job.

So if there exist an a in S, such that you would prefer a over p in the absence of alternative 2, then in a game between you and Adobe, the choice a would not be Pareto optimal. Your utility is maximized by choosing p (downloading Photoshop), Adobes utility left unchanged. --> Maximizing total utility (ignoring potential side-effects, such as effects overall attitude towards piracy and so on)

Today there exists an S for almost anything.

Whats your opinion on this in regards to utility maximization (utility of society). Can we really break it down like this looking at the individual case?

43 comments

PuyaSharif on ICONN 2012 nanotechnology conference in Perth

2012-01-18T01:30:38.372872+11:00

Academic conferences tends to be very technical, so don't expect to be able fully follow the talks. A review paper

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-14T01:11:06.848426+11:00

By human-equivalent i'd guess you mean equivalent in if not all, but in many different aspects of human intelligence. I wouldn't dare to have an opinion at the moment.

Anyone else?

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-14T01:02:22.085051+11:00

Yes I am, and I'll soon start looking for PhD-positions either in physics or some interdisciplinary field of interest. I know I seem a bit over-optimistic, and that such radical changes may take maybe at least 30-50 years, but I'd guess most of us will be alive by then so its still relevant. My main point is that step by step theoretical tasks will move to the space of computation and the job of the theoretician will evolve to something else. If one day our computers in our computer aided research starts to output suggestions for models, or links between sets of data we haven't thought about comparing wouldn't those results actually be a collaboration between us and that system? You maybe cant imagine automating everything you do, but I'm sure you can imagine parts of your research being automated. That would allow you to use more mental resources for the conceptual and creative part of the research and so on..

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-13T08:39:14.499173+11:00

I agree that the conceptual (non-simply-symbol-processing) part of theoretical physics is the tricky part to automate, and even if I am willing to accept that that last 1% will be kept in the monopoly of human beings, but then that's it; theoretical physics will asymptotically reduce to that 1% and stay there until AGI arrives. Its not bound to change over night, but the change will be the product of many small changes where computers start to aid us not by just doing the calculations and simulations but more advanced tasks where we can input sets of equations from two different sub-field and letting the computers using evolutionary algorithms try different combinations, operate on them and so on and find links. The process could end where a joint theory in a common mathematical framework succeeds to derive the phenomena in both sub fields.

EDIT: Have to add that it feels a bit awkward to argue against the future necessity of my "profession"..

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-13T07:29:54.723619+11:00

For example, music composition, writing fiction, and similar artistic endeavors require that the artist know what people enjoy. I think that that will be done by humans for the foreseeable future.

Regarding music composition; there are already algorithms being developed for predicting the potential of a song becoming a hit. Next step could be algorithms that creates the songs by themselves. Its all about optimization with positive feedback. Algorithm: Create a piece of art A such that A has a high probability of satisfying the ones experiencing it. Input statistics about human nature + reaction to previous generations + reactions to man made art of the same sort. Most people wouldn't care about how that piece of art was made. (But I guess this will take a while)

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-12T23:31:42.150555+11:00

My goal was/is to start a discussion around: 1. Strategies today for maximizing probability of being needed in the future. 2 Even more interesting, what tasks are hard/easy to automate and why? 3 The consequences automation will have on global economy. So far, the comments covers a little bit of all.

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-12T10:05:26.791088+11:00

1 Hindsight bias? Quite a diagnosis there. I never specified the level of those algorithms.

2 Which part of theoretical physics is not math? Experiments confirm or reject theoretical conclusions and points theoretical work in different directions. But that theoretical work is in the end symbol processing - something that computers are pretty good at. There could be a variety of ways for a computer to decide if a theorem is interesting just as for a human. Scope, generality and computability of the theorems could be factors. Input Newtonian mechanics and the mathematics of 1850 and output Hamiltonian mechanics just based on the generality of that framework.

PuyaSharif on What jobs are safe in an automated future?

2012-01-12T09:09:39.551973+11:00

1 Maybe I should clarify: Are the tasks previously done by bank tellers becoming automated? Yes. The fact that the number bank tellers has increased does not invalidate my statement. If there were no internet banking or ATMs then increase would be much larger right? So its trivial to see that the number of bank tellers can increase at the same time as bank teller jobs are lost to automated systems.

2 I'll give you an extreme one. I am a few steps away of earning a degree in theoretical physics specializing in quantum information theory. Theoretical quantum information theory is nothing but symbol manipulation in a framework on existing theorems of linear algebra. With enough resources pretty much all of the research could be done by computers alone. Algorithms could in principle put mathematical statements together, other algorithms testing the meaningfulness of the output and so on.. but that a discussion interesting enough to have its own thread. I just mean that theoretical work is not immune to automation.

Organize all the known mathematics and physics of 1915 in a computer running the right algorithms, the ask it: 'what is gravity?' Would it output General theory of relativity? I think so.

What jobs are safe in an automated future?

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:48:53 +1100

Submitted by PuyaSharif • 8 votes • 99 comments

The trends are clear, more and more work that was previously done by humans are being shifted to automated systems. Factories with thousands of workers has been replaced by highly efficient facilities containing industrial robots and a few human operators, bank tellers by online banking, most parts of any logistics chain by different types of automatic sorting, moving, and sending mechanisms. Offices are run by less and less people as we're handling and processing fewer and fewer physical documents. In any area less people than before are needed to do the same work as before. The world is becoming automated.

These developments are not only here to stay - they are accelerating. Most of what is done by humans today could easily be done by computers in a near future. I would personally guess that most professions existing today could be replaced by affordable automated equivalents within 30 years. My question is: What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?

Often education is pointed out as safe bet to ensure being needed in the future, and while that is true its not the whole story. First of all, in basically all parts of the world the fraction of the population with an academic degree is growing fast. Higher education will probably not be as good as a differentiator in the future. Second, while degrees in the fields hot in the future is hot in the future there is no guarantee that the degrees hot today will be of any use later on. Third, there is a misconception that highly theoretical tasks done by skilled experts will be among the last to go. But due to their theoretical nature such tasks are fairly easy represent virtually.

Of course as we progress technologically new doors are opening and the hottest job year 2030 might not even exist today. Any suggestions?

99 comments